How we uncovered years of sexual allegations against David Walliams

For the past three years, ITV News and the Guardian have been jointly investigating allegations that David Walliams targeted teens as young as 15 for sex. ITV News Correspondent Lucy Watson explains how we carried out that investigation.

I've been investigating allegations against David Walliams for the past three years, alongside the Guardian newspaper. Our research has led to a number of women making serious claims against the comedian, who they met when they were teenagers. In a special documentary, on YouTube and ITVX, we have aired their stories. Some of the allegations date back more than 20 years. Others – it’s claimed – happened more recently.

Walliams denies all allegations made against him, including any criminal behaviour.

Bringing this investigation to air has been like no other assignment I have ever worked on throughout my 20-year career in journalism. The careful legal considerations that have had to be made, the amount of documentation that has needed collating, and the quantity of corroborative evidence that we needed to compile have meant we haven't been able to share what we've learned with the public – until now.

It all began back in 2022, when ITV News first got a tip-off from within the publishing world. But it wasn't until 2023 that I got involved. In late September of that year, I was walking across the newsroom and the Head of Investigations, Imogen Barrer, stopped me and said: “There's something I need to talk to you about. I'd like you to meet someone.”

Shortly after that, I met Alex* with a journalist from the Guardian, and we have worked alongside each other ever since. Alex, like many of the people ITV News has spoken to, asked for her identity to be protected. That is simply because she – like others – is fearful. They are fearful of legal retribution or public retribution. Their pseudonyms are marked with an asterisk.

We arranged to have coffee with Alex in a café at London Bridge. She was very obviously nervous when she arrived. Alex had brought documents with her from her teenage years, and showed us emails, show tickets and guest passes to Little Britain that she still had. She'd kept them all from when she was younger, from the time she says she was in contact with Walliams.

Sitting there in the café, she talked to me about how the whole experience had affected her. Alex is now in her 30s and a mother. It was clear to me then – and now – that it still looms large in her life. From the off, she described Walliams as having abused his power as a celebrity.

Watch ITV News’ documentary, David Walliams: Power and Silence, on ITVX and YouTube

Walliams is a huge figure in British cultural life. Not only does he span different areas of the entertainment industry, but he also spans generations. I remember catchphrases from Little Britain being said in school, and when I was at university.

Walliams also moved into Saturday night television as a presenter. He's gone into film. He's gone into literature. He also carried out huge feats for charity. He has huge power, huge influence, huge fame and is a very well-known character, not just here in Britain but across the world.

Walliams was often in the papers, often seen out on red carpets with models and famous actresses. I remember him marrying a supermodel. I also remember him on chat shows being teased about his relationships. His romantic life was often a point of jokes or a point of ridicule.

After that first meeting with Alex, we realised her allegation was similar to that of the tip-off we'd received. These accusations prompted more than three years of investigative work between ITV News and the Guardian. It was an enormous undertaking.

Several people did not want to chat with us, but many did. They included celebrities, reality TV stars and even former close friends of his. And, so many times, his alleged behaviour was described to me as an “open secret” but, I was repeatedly told, “you'll struggle to get people to talk to you about it”.

We did get people who were willing to open up. But getting people to say what they experienced or witnessed in front of a camera is a totally different request. Sometimes there's a shame attached to it that they don't want anybody to know that something of that nature happened to them when they were younger. There is often a fear of legal or public repercussions.

We gathered information from different aspects of Walliams’ career and different periods of his life. That work continued for months, going into years, until December 2025, when the children’s author was dropped by his publisher, HarperCollins. They decided in December not to publish any of his new books after claims were made against him. Claims of inappropriate behaviour in the workplace, and allegations that he’d harassed junior, female employees. At the time, Walliams’ spokesperson said he hadn’t been informed of any accusations against him and denied behaving inappropriately.

Almost immediately after that story broke, I started to receive messages and calls. One particular message really stood out. It said: “And so it begins.”

What that news did, was embolden people. People who we had spoken to in the past, even people we hadn't spoken to, felt more confident to talk about their experiences because for a company of that size to drop an author of that level of financial importance was a big, bold step. Walliams has published 26 million books in the UK alone, making around £156 million with HarperCollins.

One of the first interviews we recorded was with Alex. She spoke about her first encounter with Walliams, aged 15, at a Little Britain CD signing in 2004. He was 32 at the time.

By the time she was 17, she says it had developed into a consensual sexual relationship.

Alex was a huge comedy fan and really wanted to get into the industry when she was older. She says she was ambitious and had won a few competitions for comedy sketches she’d written in the past, so she turned up at the fan event to see if she could give the comedy duo her scripts, with the hope of getting work experience.

When she met Walliams, she handed him some comedy sketches she’d written, with a covering letter that had her contact details on. The TV star phoned her days later, she says, and that's how their communication first began. They then exchanged emails and he sent her a card. She sent him more of her comedy sketches and scripts. He, several times, asked about her age.

Alex was able to recall the moment she met up with him again. She remembered arriving for the first time at Walliams’ house, when she was 17, and told us how the relationship became physical.

“I remember he just shoved his tongue in my mouth,” said Alex. “I just hadn't ever experienced anything like that before. And then I just kind of followed his lead, really. We went on his bed, and we had sex...

“I was too young. I really don't think I would have had the ability to get the words out at that point to say, ‘don't do that’.

“He was a figure of authority to me and someone that I looked to for guidance and help, and he used that power and abused that power the minute he felt he just about could.”

At that meeting in London Bridge, she said she now felt she had been “groomed” by Walliams when she was a teenager.

Walliams denies grooming Alex or any woman. He says claims that he targeted teenage women and used his celebrity status to manipulate them to have sex with him, are false.

Another woman, Jade*, was also 15 when she says she first came into contact with Walliams. But it was slightly different. She alleges he reached out to her on MySpace. She says her date of birth was on her profile page. He was 36 years old.

That evening, Jade says he asked her for her telephone number. She says he called her within minutes and they discussed her age and school. It was only a couple of weeks later, she says, that they met up in London at a café.

During that meet-up, she says she told him she’d been sexually abused when she was younger. Shortly after leaving the café, Jade says she recalls he took her down an alleyway and kissed her, and then they went back to his house. Jade says she remembers every moment of that encounter in his kitchen, how he was standing at the counter, how nervous she was.

“That's when he kissed me again,” she told us. “He lifted my top up and sucked on my breast, and then tried to put my hand down his trousers, and that's when I pulled away and said no. I wasn't ready for sex... I mean, I was only a 15-year-old.”

Walliams denies any sexual contact with Jade and rejects any allegations of criminal activity. He also says he has never engaged in the grooming of young women.

Jade was one of five women we spoke to who claim that they were the targets of Walliams’ unwanted sexual advances.

This investigation has not just involved speaking to individuals who claim they had direct experiences with Walliams. We have also had to speak to the friends of these individuals, people more removed from these women, people who said, “yes, I was there”, people who could corroborate events and experiences. We've talked to people based across the world to try to verify these stories and encounters.

As well as the five women who we’ve interviewed for the documentary, we've also spoken to dozens of others who also had concerns about Walliams’ behaviour. They say they experienced it themselves, witnessed it, or were told about it happening at the time. They include people like a former close friend of his, young models and female fans he messaged out of the blue, as well as people who worked directly with him, whether that be at HarperCollins or at Britain's Got Talent.

In 2022, Walliams left Britain's Got Talent after the Guardian published leaked transcripts of recordings of him making derogatory and sexually explicit remarks about contestants off-air. He apologised at the time and claimed they were “private conversations”. Three years later, he was dropped by HarperCollins.

We spoke to Katie* who worked at the publishing house. In 2015, she says she was approached by a young, junior employee who showed her emails that Walliams had sent to her. Katie was troubled by them and alerted two different departments within HarperCollins. She also told us that conventional working practices the company normally adopted with high-value authors had to be changed for Walliams.

“We would never send any of the girls on their own to his flat,” she told us.

At the end of each one of the interviews I have done, I've asked each of them: “What is it that you are accusing David Walliams of?" It is not ITV News, it is not the Guardian, who are making these claims. It is the women who want to tell their stories, and we are reporting on their allegations, after careful legal consideration.

We are putting these allegations in the public domain because we believe there is a strong public interest to do so.

And we have only got to the point of broadcast after a rigorous and lengthy investigative process. Along the whole way, careful legal and editorial considerations have had to be made.

To get in contact confidentially with us about this story email investigations@itv.com

Most of the women we've interviewed are now in their mid to late 30s. Jade first met him, she says, when she was 15. But that whole experience, and her encounter with Walliams, she says, has stayed with her for 19 years.

“I struggle with it sometimes - if I think about it a bit too much, about the reality of what happened,” she told us. “It's a sexual assault, it's a grooming. It's completely wrong in every way.”

And Alex says, even though she had sex with Walliams aged 17 – so, above the legal age of consent – she considers it an abuse of his power.

"I never said no, but I felt unable to say anything or have any control in that situation once I was with him. I think I was groomed 100%,” she said. “If that person is double your age. If that person has promised you things, and is in a much bigger position of power than you, both in age, in work, in finance, and in stature and size, like everything. I really don't think that's okay.”

All the women we have spoken to in the documentary consider that Walliams abused his power, and status as a celebrity, for sexual motives.

And that's the claim at the heart of this investigation. A claim that he denies.

We put the allegations being made in our documentary to Walliams back in May. And it was at that point that this investigation took an extraordinarily difficult, challenging and distressing turn.

We were informed by his team that he had made an attempt to take his own life and was in a psychiatric hospital voluntarily. The whole team was shocked and concerned to hear about this and we immediately paused our plans.

What followed were months of communication between us, the Guardian, and David Walliams’ lawyers. We continued to extend our deadlines, and delay publication, always conscious of the very difficult balance we needed to strike between considering the mental health of a person with a diagnosed condition, and the need to air serious allegations and the stories of people who told us they had been harmed.

In July, we were informed by Walliams' lawyers that he had made another attempt to take his own life. Again, it was distressing news.

After months of back and forth, discussions, deliberations, and after taking expert medical advice that told us Walliams was in hospital – in the safest place possible for his condition – we decided to proceed to publish in late July, nearly three months after we first sent our request for comment.

We do not want people to be damaged by our work, but sometimes we have to expose situations that cause anguish and upset. That is an unavoidable part of our role as journalists.

At this point, his lawyers then informed us that they were going to file the paperwork to try and get a permanent injunction in place to stop any publication or broadcast of the allegations.

The normal route to getting an injunction is based on privacy grounds, but Walliams' lawyers were arguing that publication would violate his right to life and subject him to inhuman and degrading treatment. He said if we published or broadcast the story he would kill himself.

We then had to wait until October for the two-day trial to go ahead.

We all went to court – as did the rest of the media – and in open court, Mr Justice Matthew Nicklin, former Chief Judge of the Media and Communications Court, heard evidence from both sides. This case was not a trial of whether the allegations are true. This was about whether the court should prevent us and the Guardian from publishing them because of the effect that would have on Walliams' mental health – and the risk that he would take his own life.

Throughout the whole process, there were reporting restrictions in place to prevent Walliams from being identified. He was only ever referred to as The Claimant PPT versus Independent Television News and Guardian News Media. We were the Defendants.

That process took us to November 3, when Justice Nicklin gave his ruling. Again, we were all there. It was an extremely tense day but ultimately, the judge dismissed Walliams' claim and refused the injunction. Despite the judgement, we still could not publish and had to wait and see if he would appeal. The judge gave him until 4.30pm on Monday, November 9 to do that.

But he chose not to appeal. It meant ITV News and the Guardian were able to reveal his identity and publish the allegations four years after we started investigating David Walliams.

Ultimately, in response to this investigation, Walliams said: "Looking back, I realise that at times I behaved thoughtlessly towards other people I had casual sexual relationships with...

“I realise I did not always take people’s feelings properly into account. That is something I regret. And whilst a power imbalance is inevitable when one party is famous, abusing that power is something else entirely and it is something I never did...

“I am not a sexual predator... I have not broken the law... I am devastated that some of the women I met ten to twenty years ago have now expressed hurt or anger towards me.”

In a statement responding to our investigation, HarperCollins said: “HarperCollins UK previously terminated its publishing relationship with David Walliams. We take the safety of our people incredibly seriously and to respect the privacy of individuals we do not comment on employee matters."

BGT’s production company, Fremantle UK, also gave a response, and said: “David Walliams left Britain’s Got Talent four years ago. During his time on the show and in the four years since, no complaint has ever been made - either to Fremantle UK, the broadcaster or regulator... regarding his behaviour.

“Nevertheless, if anyone feels they have been the subject of any impropriety or wrongdoing by anyone, we encourage them to come forward. We will treat any complaints seriously and investigate thoroughly and to the best of our ability.”

Syco Entertainment, the company that created BGT, said: “Syco Entertainment had no knowledge of the allegations described and was not made aware of them at the time.”

ITV, which broadcasts BGT, responded saying: “We are very sorry to hear about the concerns that have been raised. BGT is produced for ITV by Fremantle, an independent production company. Although ITV is the broadcaster of the programme, the producer has day to day responsibility for the running of the production, including all aspects of duty of care, and for ensuring compliance with all legal and regulatory obligations as well as ITV’s production and compliance guidelines.”

To get in contact confidentially with us about this story, email investigations@itv.com

If you’ve been affected by any of the issues raised, help is available here.

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